A ballet icon still giving new life to movements

A good phrase is a good phrase, legendary choreographer Twyla Tharp says.

“It’s like a good melody. It’s like a composer at a piano bench — he remembers his melodies,” the 70-year-old says in a recent telephone interview from Atlanta. “I’ll remember a very good phrase that never made it anywhere and I rephrase it.”

Her phrases — or series of dance movements — have formed more than 135 works, including Broadway shows, movies and original dances, many for the world’s most eminent ballet companies. Sometimes, she’ll remember a good work and she’ll re-imagine it or expand it, which is the case with Come Fly Away, a dance revue set to the songs of Frank Sinatra. After playing on Broadway and Las Vegas, it opens Aug. 16 at the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts in Toronto.

She first choreographed pieces to three Sinatra songs featuring Mikhail Baryshnikov for a benefit for the American Ballet Theater in the ’70s. “Misha and I obviously both were [Sinatra] fans. For the gala, there was a possibility that he might sing it live,” she recalls. Sinatra did not end up singing that evening. But his music still inspired Tharp to create Nine Sinatra Songs, a suite of duets, which debuted in 1982 and then Sinatra Suite.

“It became somewhat interesting to think about putting those duets into an emotional context, to put them into a dramatic narrative, to give them that life,” she says. “Two of the original duets from Nine Sinatra Songs are in Come Fly Away … but the [characters] are given much more depth.”

When she speaks, Tharp is thoughtful, serious and matter-of-fact. “I started dancing when I was a baby. I had my own space by the time I was three. … That was where I began this work.” When she describes the workings of a dance, for example, the patter affords a glimpse into the creative, complex mind of a virtuoso: “The spine of it is a 120-count phrase that extends throughout the entire piece with inversions and retrogrades and cross-cutting.”

But her genius still allows for some whimsy: “There are little pieces of movement inserted in counts between one and two, and between counts six and seven so it enriches the movement — like trills and embellishments in a musical phrase,” she says of a style of dance that she originated 40 years ago. “We called it ‘stuffing’ because we were working on a farm outside New York and it was the day before Thanksgiving.”

The “stuffing” became a kind of signature — a technique from her blending of modern and traditional dance. She’s working on archiving her dances; Tharp has been video taping her own improvisational work since 1968, resulting in hundreds of hours of footage. “This art form until now has never had the option of preserving itself this way — the evolution of the dancing body.”

Her appreciation for film recordings may have been sparked at a young age. Her parents ran a drive-in theatre in southern California where she worked from the age of eight. “Do you know any women who were directing movies in 1963?” She responds when asked about early aspirations to do film. “But there were some women who were making dances and impacting on that world.”

She and her dance company have been considering a lot lately how to honour her impact on the world; in 2015, she will celebrate the 50th anniversary of her first concert. There is no indication that she is slowing down. Every day, she awakes at 6:30 a.m. and performs 40 minutes of isometric stretching, does a “rudimentary and very ugly barre” and 30 minutes of aerobic exercise.